Saber Blog » Piper Severance

Help #EndMuralMoratorium: Meeting to Discuss New Mural Ordinance Tonight @ Known Gallery

Piper Severance — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:04:48 +0000

Please join us for a very special evening at Known Gallery with LA City Planner, Tanner Blackman for an update and group discussion on LA’s potential New Mural Ordinance.

Immediately following Tanner’s update, we will be discussing public art, murals, and community expectations for the new draft ordinance to be presented to City Council for approval.The discussion will feature Isabel Rojas Williams, Executive Director the Mural Conservancy of LA and Daniel Lahoda as Founder of the LA Freewalls Project. The discussion will be moderated by Piper Severance, Manager of SaberOne Studios.

This discussion is imperative to anyone who is working in the streets, or interested in Public Art. Please come and make your voice heard!

This Is Only The Beginning

Piper Severance — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 14:03:31 +0000

Photo by ReignmanP

My commute down Fairfax Avenue has pretty heavy street art traffic. One of the recent gems of this stretch of our pot-hole ridden streets is the mural on Fairfax and Rosewood by Retna, Rime, Revok, Norm, Saber, and Os Gêmeos. I was horrified to see an orange Graffiti Control Systems van parked in front of the wall on my way to work Thursday morning. It was being BUFFED! They had just started rolling over Rime’s characters as I drove past. I resisted every impulse to turn back and wrote the tweet in the car when I got to LACMA. I hit “send” the moment I emerged from the underground parking and by the time I got to my desk Saber had hit the timeline with a flood of comments including:

The wall was painted in July 2010, and I remember it was an exciting production. Besides Os Gêmeos being in LA from Brazil, Jeffrey Deitch stopped by and had everyone buzzing about the MoCA show. Almost a year later, LA Taco’s headline pointed out One Week From “Art in the Streets” and Someone is Destroying Art by Famous Artists.

Photo via Melrose & Fairfax

Melrose & Fairfax were the first on the scene and posted the buffing in action. LA Taco looked into Who is Graffiti Control Systems? and posted their Facebook and Yelp pages. It soon became clear that the company had pulled the locked gate off it’s hinges to get to the mural. The buffing was stopped before it covered the whole wall by the outraged owner of the building, actress Julie Newmar. In a comment on the LA Weekly art news blog she said “Trust me, I will get to the bottom of this. The crime will not go unpunished.”

The angry local and street art community took to the web and demanded action. Blogging Los Angeles said “Seeing artwork like this destroyed is disgusting.” FatCap posted about the irresponsible business of buffing legal public art and posed the excellent question, “When are we going to organize ourselves effectively in order to preemptively combat this affront?” By the middle of the day, Graffiti Control Systems Facebook page had been pulled down and their Yelp rating plunged to 1 star. Later, Dennis Romero of LA Weekly spoke to sincerely apologetic company representative, Josh Woods who said “It was a mistake. We did not do it maliciously. It turned out to be misinformation. There was no intent whatsoever to destroy a mural. We were informed by people in the neighborhood that it was an illegal mural and was to come down. As soon as we were informed on site that it was there with permission we ceased removal.” In the article Wood promised that workers would be back the next day and attempt to remove the layer of paint.

Photo via Melrose & Fairfax

True to his word, I passed workers trying to remove buff from the wall on Friday morning. Woods made an updated statement to the LA Weekly “… We were able to remove all of the paint we applied and as we expected some parts of the mural came off but most is intact and looks to be in pretty good shape. And most importantly the overall aesthetic of the mural has been re-established.” He also reiterated that Graffiti Control Systems would like to foot the bill for touch-up.

With the help of many, this beautiful work of public art has survived. But with the battle won, Graffuturism wondered “Will this be a one time mistake? The significance of this mural and the prominence of the artists involved that were painted over will have some serious aftershocks. The disregard of their artistic merit of this mural so close to the opening of MoCA doesn’t paint a pretty picture for Los Angeles. With this new age of Twitter and its viral strength we could see some very widespread action from the artists and its supporters if this continues.”

The fact that many of these artists are included in MoCA’s Art in the Streets exhibition should not obscure the hostile environment they frequently work in. The future of this art movement will be shaped by the people who love it and as Deitch points out “This is only the beginning.”

- Piper Severance

@PSPublicSquare

We the People and our American Flag

Piper Severance — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:42:30 +0000

A few months ago a video that Saber created was chosen as a finalist in Organizing for America’s Health Care Video Challenge. You can see the original video entry over on Arrested Motion (as well as some great production shots of the new Flag print which you can buy here). Needless to say, the video had a few critics (see the full Fox News response), but I doubt any of them understood what is means when an American graffiti artist turns his talent toward such a powerful (and art historically significant) symbol.

Saber, Tarnished Flag, 2009
mixed media on canvas, 19.3 X 25 in • 49 X 63.5 cm
art/ photo © 2010 saberone.com

When I saw the first flag he painted last year, I was surprised. It was overtly political in a way that had been uncharacteristic of Saber’s art thus far. Compelling in its raw emotion, the dingy gray of the white stripes was created by words like oil, Katrina and Blackwater. Scratched into the textured surface, those words seem to further stain the flag with the dripping of red American blood. And in the square, he wrote the names of people, a real source of American power. This Tarnished Flag spoke to me of the anger, sorrow and silent shame of things done in the name of all Americans in the first decade of the 21st century.

With the impasto technique Saber was using, I could not help thinking about Jasper Johns (born in 1930), one of most significant and influential American painters of the twentieth century. In the mid- to late 1950s, Johns became known for painting, as he put it, “things the mind already knows,” familiar icons like the American flag. The detail below of Flag illustrates an early technique of his, painting with thick, dripping encaustic over a collage made from found materials such as newspaper. Yet, even though it is literally made up of the news of the day, Johns’ America of 1955 still retains it’s tidy rows of red and white stripes and pattern of stars.

Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55

I wondered last year if the symbol of the flag would be as strong a draw on Saber as it was on Johns, now I feel certain of it. In Saber’s recently released Flag 2010, the tidy order of mid-century America has been shattered. The states represented by stars in 1955 are now gone, replaced by the words: “We the people.” Like much of our civil discourse, few barriers are respected and paint drips and juts aggressively over the lines. In this series of prints, the “white stripes” seem to recede back, forming a wall on which the issues of our time are being hotly debated.

Saber, Flag 2010 (in Red/White/Blue), 2010
11 color Serigraph on hand-made Nepalese Cannabina Fiber, 21″ x 30″ (54cm x 77cm)
art/ photo © 2010 saberone.com

If the life and movement of the color print speaks of a vibrant (if aggressive) civic debate, then the black version of the Flag 2010 shows the country drained of meaning. The layering of the words look even more tangled and muddied in this version, a stark reminder that difficult issues can imprison minds that only think in terms of black and white.

Saber, Flag 2010 (Black), 2010
11 color Serigraph on hand-made Nepalese Cannabina Fiber, 21″ x 30″ (54cm x 77cm)
art/ photo © 2010 saberone.com

You can see the same ambiguity of meaning in Jasper John’s work on paper, Flag, from 1958. While still clearly legible as the flag, the active pencil scribbles and gray graphite wash that form the symbol appear to dissolve much of its meaning and power.

Jasper Johns, Flag, 1958
Pencil and Graphite Wash on Paper, 8 7/8 x 12 in.
Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

That ambiguity vanishes in Saber’s gold leafed version of Flag 2010. In this print, solid gold bars with heavy outlines form the barrier between the rich and the rest of us. This is the symbol of a “greed is good” America, a place where money buys political power and the growing income inequality of last 30 years has resulted in a second Gilded Age.

Saber, Flag 2010 (Gold Leaf), 2010
11 color Serigraph on hand-made Nepalese Cannabina Fiber, 21″ x 30″ in. (54cm x 77cm)
art/ photo © 2010 saberone.com

Like Jasper Johns before him, Saber seems to have grasped the endless diversity of meaning that can be found in the symbol of our nation.

Saber’s Mini Flag linoleum print is only the size of a credit card. As we enter 2010, bailed-out out banks are giving out millions in bonuses while raising fees on their customers. I don’t know about you, but I believe that a symbol of America that is within reach of “we the people” is better than any cheap plastic promise.